I was rummaging through my archives and found my first serious work with Photoshop version 1.0.
This is a little time capsule of obsolete technology. I took the photo of the Los Angeles skyline with a Polaroid SX-70 camera. The image itself is 8-bit dithered, I don’t think Photoshop did 24 bit color yet.
The photo was taken from the roof of the parking ramp where I worked at ComputerLand on Olive Street in Downtown LA. You can see the famous Oviatt Building in the foreground, and the First Interstate Tower and the Gas Company Tower in the background. This dates the photo pretty accurately to 1990, when construction of the buildings was completed. I thought it was earlier than that, more like 1988, but the skyscrapers did not exist then.
I scanned some Macs from a brochure, then composited the machines into the skyline. I didn’t get the perspective perfectly correct, but it was a pretty good attempt, considering I had never done anything like this. Nobody had done anything like this before. Matching perspectives was an old idea from photo-compositing, but it was a new idea in the digital world.
This photo became a phenomenon in the LA Apple scene. I put a big inkjet print in my office, the Apple reps saw it and constantly asked for prints. I think the idea got around, other designers must have seen it at the Apple offices, because I saw advertising in Mac magazines that were almost exact copies of this idea.